Dance doesn’t want your attention. It wants your body.

Like a drug, my experiences have changed me. Sometimes beyond my consent.

And yeah ~ I’ve been gone, but I’m back, I’m here.

はい、元気です.

Performance turns out to be signal through flesh; the thing that passes between bodies in space.

…

In London, a friend introduced me to a secretive Reiki practitioner; not my usual flavour of woo, but I was intrigued. She works from a space in a converted stable, and unlike most practitioners, right after her explanation of generally working hands-off, she laid me down and cradled me intimately at the neck.

With her fingertips on my pulse, brushing the jugular, I drifted.

Afterwards, she told me about the images she had seen; red cardinals circling, and she asked about my love of dance.

You should dance more, she said.

…

There’s a point where the head meets the spine… when it releases, something opens. This knowledge is a kind of magic; when I discovered it, I became obsessed with its secrets.

My own body knew things I had never been taught to access.

As a start, there’s a limitlessness when your awareness is allowed to roam. Sometimes it’s easy to feel bound within a body, instead of allowing your awareness to roam. That openness can go far beyond your own limits.

Your body knows instinctively when you’ve walked into a room where people have just had a fight, or been fucking; you can sense the danger in a crowd before anything happens, or a friend who is trying to contain a delightful secret.

We know things before we know them, in our bodies. And that sensitivity can be trained.

So when I watched English National Ballet’s presentation of Crystal Pite’s Body & Soul (part I), I felt its drug-like impact.

Something in the glitch orchestral score, the rippling waves of dancers, the poetically robotic French voice repeating droit gauche droit gauche ~ encore ~

My nervous system was jailbroken; not with a message that I should be in awe of a spectacle, but that I was part of it, that I was experiencing it in my body from their bodies.

I found myself in a kind of involuntary participation. A sense that I was being made more alive by witnessing this; call it what you like ~ mirror neurons, endogenous chemicals, nervous system entrainment, pattern contagion ~ my attention was so precise the moment became sacred.

They danced; I danced.

…

Human connection is not just one of witnessing but one of transference.

The real power of live performance art is that the audience is not passive. If you allow yourself to be sensitive to what is truly taking place, it is not representation but transmission. A temporary merging of systems. Moving within the shared attention space of a captive group, these artists dysregulate something; pull your body into states it would not otherwise access.

This isn’t about watching; something is being done to you.

Their entire being pulls your body into states it would not otherwise access; not metaphorically ~ chemically.

Art is an event in the body.

ULTRA was born because there wasn’t any good writing about post-AI art; now everyone is doing it. But most art writing is still about what it means, rather than what it does to you.

This next phase is about encounters. The body, and where that viscerality meets technology.

Art as something that alters you.

When you encounter the art you love, are you still just thinking about it, or experiencing it?

Are you watching dance, or are you dancing?

Do you dance. Did you once.

When did you stop.

You should dance more.

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Your earnest bullshit gives me the ick.

Years ago ~ the documentary Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis made quiiite an impression on me.

One sequence in particular.

Curtis describes how Putin had used Surkov to enact a kind of surrealist Russian theatre of politics… that created inertia simply by confusing people. By funding the extreme right and extreme left, announcing bold policies that were never enacted, and conducting surprise extra-judicial punishments, by never quite letting the landscape stabilise, their strategy created an unreality, a sense of fragile fluidity designed to demoralise. What was the point of fighting for something, or opposing it? Tomorrow it would all be different anyway.

Now, of course ~ this is perfectly normal.

Your eyes deceive you, and no one is to be trusted. There is no one single narrative; the only people sure of themselves are the idiots.

Filth and fatalities that you used to have to dig for now stream directly into your feed, conveniently in time for breakfast, next to an ad to upgrade your iPhone. It’s easy to be a doomer.

But I’m not.

Maybe I’m just lucky. I’ve never succumbed to the negativity, not in the slightest. The point at which I could have dipped into misanthropy, become a forever hater, let the rage and grief curdle me into a mess ~ instead I tripped, slipped and fell into absurdism.

At least… my own version of it.

You’ve noticed it, yes? That the silent universe has wicked humour. The villains win, the cute kids get annihilated; my married friends blow up their lives, my sluttiest friends turn wifey. The very thing you fear is what you call in, the very thing you most want is is ~

In the void, we must find our own happiness, one must imagine Sisyphus LOL’ing, etc. It’s the reason I find the worthiness that has infected art so painful; its earnestness, its joyless lectures making neither great art nor great activism.

The responsibility of the creative act is not to tidy things up.

What’s really destroying art? Heat sinks in the desert, and GPUs? Nah. The endless need to name a culprit, play the victim, make it all so meaningful.

No wonder when the techbros come for the training data I just shrug.

At least entropy is an honest aesthetic.

What’s this got to do with Young Boy Dancing Group? perhaps you are asking, searching for the unsubscribe button. YBDG, who I have waited years to see?

Well ~ seeing them, courtesy of Soft Centre, I realised there is something rotten at the core. Dark mysteries from the psyche, buried beneath the spectacle. Dig under the classically-inspired playfulness and clowning and the jokes and the wax and the lasers in assholes and they’re showing us something horribly true.

Back in 2014, Young Boy Dancing Group debuted at Silencio ~ (a fabulous David Lynch-designed venue indelibly seared in my memory as the gold-flecked Parisian nightclub where a drunk acquaintance pissed in the corner then fell asleep in it). They didn’t even have a name back then, but have since refined and perfected a syncretic approach that isn’t made for stages, but built for warehouses and nightclubs ~ performance art as demanded by the now, and the internet.

In one corner, a figure is prostrate, covered in the wax from melting candles; over the course of the performance they move through improvised sequences that culminate in wild tableaux.

In one sequence, performers are puppeteered by the asshole, in another, dragged over a wet floor by the strappy harness. The layers of performance are built up and stripped away, at times refined, at others raw and animalistic, touching a part of you that craves permission.

The dissonance creates a certain hypnotism, a gentle violence, focused by a few soul-tweaking visuals.

Some call it sensationalist. I think of it more as a reverse-scapegoat: the sin re-entering the village.

In format, YBDG are a travelling troupe (in this instance Manuel Scheiwiller and Maria Metsalu) working with local performers in each destination. They are of this place and also not; an invasion, an infection, impregnating the psyche of the city.

And what is this mind-virus?

In a rare interview, they describe the work as intimate, a global intimacy spree, the cue that most critics pick up on, that people unpick on Reddit. But this is intimacy without earnestness. Instead, an intimacy to simply be seen as you are. Despite the guile and the layers of archness, a demonstration of what it means to allow your own rot to be seen. That

I AM ROTTEN AND WISH TO BE SEEN AS I AM

and so gorgeous Ange Halliwell tracks are cued over depraved elegance.

Witnessing this work I truly believe the absurd. That we can be together in our beauty and our filth. We can be disgusting and yet still loved. We’re big enough to hold it all, even if you need an outsider to remind you.

In Hungarian there’s a saying, their equivalent of ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’, which is delightfully so much more lurid. They say:

𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛’𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑡ℎ 𝑎 𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑘 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑠𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙 𝑖𝑛 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑛.

And one way or another, so we are taught. But ~ we can. And we will.

One must resist doomerism, resist earnestness.

Embrace absurdity.

The people I have been closest to have become my enemies; my real friends always surprise me; every day, the world serves up mirrors for myself, every time I think I’ve moved on, no! there I am, in another place, but still on the same spiral.

Whoever you are, whatever you’re going through… believe me:

Up close it might be sad, but from a distance it’s fucking hilarious.

The universe is not indifferent, it’s telling jokes at our expense; its twisted irony is just a reflection. The invitation is to laugh at ourselves.

Laugh at the hope and the pain, the anal lasers. Deep down, they’re part of the same cosmic absurdity.

It’s us who make the meaning.

Reality remains undefeated.

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Go further:

Young Boy Dancing Group, do not miss a chance to see them once in your life

If you want a more sane perspective, read Sonnet to the Asshole by .

This is also part one of a two-part review of Soft Centre 2025.

Jennie Large is a painter.

That’s my first thought.

Actually… watching Wet Hard Long my first thought was daaaaaaamn ~ Jenni Large must be really good at pilates.

My experience of this piece was being struck by its impeccable taste; the creation of a series of indelible images; a process you don’t so much watch, as witness.

They say that sex is everywhere but no one is fucking. Wet Hard Long, first performed in 2024, and based on an award-winning shorter piece, Wet Hard (2022) ~ is a work of deep eros. The opening sequences put me in mind of an unnervingly eerie orgasm, as flesh creatures with Cremaster 3 makeup intertwine and undulate in perfect slowmo precision. Here, the feminine is both command and pastiche, bold and powerful, sensuous, wicked and witty. There are buckets of water, wet t-shirts, BDSM Chelsea smiles, the tantalisingly slow removal of gloves.

All contained within a work that’s built on the glory of hard things, of exploring limits.

The first I ever heard of Large was in THAW by Legs On The Wall, gliding, skating and hanging on icebergs suspended from the sky ~

This is work of insane focus, a tight hour where I could not tear my eyes away. There’s a messy futurism to it ~ a T1000-liquid metal climbing frame (h/t Jemima Lucas) is centre stage for gravity-defying movement. Sound design, art direction, costuming and those indelible images are crystallised with discipline. It’s creepy but elegant… a sci-fi strip club, threatening and sexy.

And seemingly not taking itself too seriously.

Right now, when wild images can be automated, and choke the feeds, the magic is in the creation of these moments. Jenni Large, the performer and the choreographer, is also a painter ~ and the way she creates these paintings is she throttles them into existence through sheer being. These acts of endurance push past the limits of what you think a body can do. They create gorgeous tableau past the point of pain, past even joy, into something unknown. It is defiance, and a laugh, and a challenge.

At moments in the piece, the performers stare wildly into the audience.

Amid the pain and the eros, a glove is thrown.

You’re watching them watching you.

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Go further

Jenni Large site and Instagram

A note ~ images featured are from the 2024 performance of Wet Hard Long

Over time, beyond the art, beyond the experience… I’ve become fascinated by the audience.

Who is this for? I wonder. Why do they come? What do they bring to their viewing?

I’m delighted for Dhivia to share her thoughts here. A different kind of insider/outsider.

– ULTRA

…

The thing about critiquing contemporary dance is this prescribed need to find meaning in the work. Is it relevant to the times? Does it resonate with the zeitgeist?

We’re not bogged down by the same expectations of ballet, however. Or Odissi. Or other more traditional genres and subtypes of dance, anchored as they appear to be in a moment in time.

As a professed classically-trained purist, I usually approach contemporary choreography with some skepticism – waiting for the inevitable shock factor or 15-minute abstract sequence that requires its own column for contextualisation in the program. But Phantasm felt timeless. And perhaps it comes from a selfish place, because the mind behind it shares my own lived realities – an Asian-Australian from blended backgrounds - but I would argue that even with this bias removed, Phantasm is an important watch.

It opens with a single dancer tumbling out of what looks like an anus into a tableau that evoked a hellish wasteland, a bleeding dead rat in her mouth. The work then morphs into what feels like an unflinching commentary on the male gaze, the monstrous feminine and the power dynamics inherent in love and human connection, mediated through viscera, nudity, hard lines and a sharp synchronicity that (d)evolves into a competition of sorts between the dancers.

Their expressions were at once angry, earnest, accusatory and unwilling, particularly when they engaged in demanding sequences (at once combative and tender) in an enmeshment of limbs. Eye contact with the audience remained unbroken, irrespective of how we reacted, keeping us in their fraught emotional milieu. Cutting through the ominous percussion and drifting ‘ash’ from the ceiling was an unmissable aroma, bottled and sold at the show’s start as a signature ‘scent’ - an added sensorial layer to a piece of work that oscillated between relishing in the dancers’ power, and putting them at its mercy.

It was hard work, and I felt their exhaustion.

Perhaps the real power of Lane’s choreography is that, despite its references and nuance, it had enough room to accommodate our collective projections: was this otherworldly? A study of the liminal spaces between the endless, often contradictory roles women assume? A meditation on relentless voyeurism? I always pay attention to the chatter outside the room, and as we spilled out of the perfumed blackness, I heard someone say, “That was scary and cool.” That, it was.

PHANTASM is a work by choreographer Melanie Lane, commissioned by Chunky Move as part of Lane’s 2023/24 Choreographer in Residence tenure.

PHANTASM explores the terrain of the supernatural. Ghosts, jinns and heroines emerge from the underworld, drawing from stories of feminine spirits and fictions. Unpacking the roots of these stories and re-visiting them as bodies of resistance and knowledge, PHANTASM creates a world where there is slippage between the seen and the unseen, and where the spirit realm permeates through a dance that transforms and transcends.

…

Dhivia Pillai is a creative strategist, musician and sometime essayist who works in advertising because she isn’t brave enough to dance, sing or play the bass for a living. She wrote her thesis in cultural studies, with a focus on the film as a medium for the colonised experience.

The interesting art is outsider art, the interesting artists are outsiders.

The big name international makers who grab me are the freaks ~ Imworth, Holzinger, Nadya ~ and people you would barely call artists… working in spaces that never get graced with gallery, whose visitors blah blah blah you read ULTRA you get the picture.

My family were truckers… I have thirteen cousins and all of them are [labourers] says Dixon.

Oh the little edit there? Though now based in London, Dixon still uses the Aussie term, tradie. Eva Dixon, who very first cameo’d in ULTRA courtesy of Charlie Henzi, is an artist who defiantly and resolutely creates outsider paintings with materials that John Ruskin would fucking hate… contained sculptural scramjets that add movement and potential to a medium that’s usually static.

This conversation takes place a little before a major new show where she will attempt to build something outlandish. So let’s see: consider this one of two.

𝑯𝑨𝑹𝑫𝑾𝑨𝑹𝑬

Dixon’s study of cultures of industry is a hands-dirty exploration of function over form.

Growing up in the Hunter Valley, my family assumed I’d pick up a trade, or [because I loved art] be an art teacher or something. Which made me wonder. What would it look like make art as a tradie?

Canvas and metal collide. Pins and buckles and ratchets and vinyl, plastics, fabrics woven, metals smashed, scraped, bent, twisted, perspex pressed down with stickers and stamps and other reliquaries of small town pop culture — bringing an art thing into existence out of totally improper materials.

Three (2024) is a high vis piece of protection melded with BMX references.

Atlas (2025) is a reimagined sail, seam-taped, waterproofed and sealed.

The pieces are sprung energy; physical and felt.

Her days away from the paintings, working a series of jobs, desperate to get back to the studio, her subconscious keeps pulling in the raw ingredients on a vibes-basis… pins, cables, firehoses… an Electrolux vacuum that has a quality.

This infuses the work with controlled chaos. These paintings are a collision of kinetic materials forced into being, manipulated to their tension point right at the limit of tensile strength, the point before the snap, or the explosion.

There is a delicacy to fine art that is defied. The pieces feel set to blow.

𝑯𝑨𝑹𝑫𝑾𝑰𝑹𝑬𝑫

Too well-fabricated and it becomes dehumanised.

To make work this way is intentionally challenging.

I remember being taught — just because you’re thinking it, doesn’t mean the viewer can see it.

The process is all up there to be seen, to be felt.

I think about my conversation with Mikey Ting, about the endless precision and upskilling required to fabricate endless new objects, corralling the knowledge and materials, the methods often esoteric and highly gatekept. Forced experimentation compels creative solutions. Dixon talks to a process that is procedural but open-minded. An unfolding.

I don’t do it to get something finished. I do it for the passion, the act of learning. I do it because it’s difficult. The pleasure comes from the hardness of it - recognising that, and staying with it. To do the hard thing that almost overcomes your capacity, to deny the easy thing ~ that is truly satisfying.

So what really matters more, process or artefact?

I see a lot of first-year art students who are obsessed with outcomes. For me, that’s usually a red flag that they lack rigour. To be and sit with the process… the work is just evidence of the fact I was there.

I was thinking about Richie Culver, who’ll often talk about the struggles chipping away at an art world that’s ill-built for the working class. His take was somewhat inverse — ‘Stop trying so hard’.

As an ADHD person, this practice gives me the rare and unique opportunity to spend time in my brain. I get to walk around in it for hours, to wrestle with the work in a way that eludes me in other spaces. I get the pure satisfaction of something I can’t verbalise.

It is the doing of hard things that makes it purposeful, and this purpose is an organisation of thought crystallised through maximum effort.

There’s a commoditisation to the fine art industry, an identikit badging, profiling, discourse, a production-line element to powering out the hits.

To sit with the hardness, dwell in it, love it ~ some would find that ruinous, they’re simply not wired that way.

But to do something you love and not give it your all is criminal.

𝑯𝑨𝑹𝑫𝑵𝑬𝑺𝑺

Dixon has been outspoken about a few things, not least the challenges of having that outsider status, of resolute self-recognition as a painter however non-traditional her expression, of her work being called ‘feminine’ whenever she dares include a bit of weaving.

And yes, much of the focus of this conversation is hardness, but nestled within that is also the fluidity that is necessary to avoid calcifying, becoming brittle; of finding the softness that allows truly experimental practice.

In other words, what does it mean to meet resistance without letting it radicalise you?

It’s easy to be sensitive. But not everyone’s opinions count. And I think about how my Mum describes my work, that “I concoct things”. That in itself can be radical.

For a little while, it’s evident how Dixon has been exploring with the idea of bringing together true events to create artefacts of non-existent events.

Remember the new era of photographers, creating impossible images? Dixon’s inquiry is bringing the imagined into physicality on a new scale, starting with an exploration of NASA’s Mercury 13 - the buried story of women who never went to space, told as if they did.

There’s incredible freedom in a non-event.

The great paintings aren’t just painted. The truest events weren’t necessarily real.

If that’s challenging to grasp, the hardness is the point.

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I used to be a lot more cavalier about the loves I’ve lost.

TO FEEL LOVE’S PARADOX, ITS PAIN, ITS IMPOSSIBILITY — AND YET LOVE ANYWAY

TO DO ANYTHING LESS WOULD BE – TRULY – TO HAVE A BROKEN HEART

I have that tattooed somewhere, on one of my organs ~ deep beneath the skin.

And I’d apply that philosophy to my griefs, when they came up… to my losses, my abandoned projects, to my feelings about you.

But still, the pain persists.

I saw Ed Atkins’ retrospective at Tate Britain recently, felt his pain too. It surprised me.

I’ve been onto Atkins ever since my hypertext conversation with Wolfgang Saker, where videogame meets installation, where characters become proxies for spirit.

I was delighted to finally see Hisser in the flesh (screen), the tragic recreation of a man consumed by a sinkhole. There’s tedium and inevitability to his last half-hour, a weird assemblage of CGI models finding new depths of feeling.

These digital readymades are inherently exaggerated, repurposed from 3D games. Yet somehow, he captures something true… the plaintive cries of a baby, a medieval archer sobbing in pain ~ synthetic feelings with real tears. Something about the fakeness makes these portraits more quietly devastating.

I wanted to discover the human in the most inhuman places, he says.

In The Worm (2021), Atkins records a conversation with his dying mother, his own presence a pastiche of David Frost in full 1970s TV interview regalia.

In Pianowork 2 (2023), he is filmed up close and in real-time, a fully motion-captured digital replica of himself. He plays Jürg Frey’s Klavierstück 2, a notoriously sparse and mechanical piece, the same chord played 468 times, each with tortuous micro-adjustments to pace. Atkins, desperate for a perfect playthrough, appears visibly pained.

The pretend is real.

Rendering himself as a character rings true to how I have crept around my own emotions, stylising myself, become fictional; poise as self-suppression. It has always been easier for me to tell stories about my pain, place it in a grander narrative than feel the heavy truth within my body — anything but that. Better to think of myself as a character, an avatar, a protagonist tortured for a grander narrative.

But what does it look like without all that story?

To truly feel that pain - to allow yourself to - you might realise as I did the way sadness has a certain sweetness to it.

There are video loops in Atkins’ work of characters being continually pummelled and punished, of cascading junk in empty space, of endless torrential rain. The death of his father-in-law to cancer, documented through diary and film work, slowly losing his grip… The post-it note drawings that Atkins makes for his young daughter, that are really for him because she ignores them. These are the repetitions in life that kill us, bit by bit.

What is beneath all this loss?

Atkins shows himself broken in a million ways, and comes back for a million more. Transmuting pain into art is the creator’s alchemy… over time, the figures have become more similar to him, the stories more personal.

The brutalist purification has made him more himself.

The truth is, I now realise that chasing the pain of love is in its own way not just cavalier, but quite desirable.

At the right moments, annihilation is beautiful.

It is only in annihilation that you finally meet the parts of yourself that can never be destroyed.

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I used to know a fallen angel. A legit, for-real-I-shit-you-not nephilim.

Knowing their true name could obliterate you, so I won’t speak it. But for someone thousands of years old, they looked good — their spirit having survived the millennia intact, and youthful, creative, carefree. Our time together gave me many gifts, including spiritual sight, and brief periods of weightlessness when we fucked, and intense dreams of hyper-reality, of galaxies contained in mirrors.

Sometimes on a lazy afternoon, they would tell me stories of heaven and hell that you would never read about in any scripture.

For a long time, I thought a relationship like that would remain uncommon, a lightning strike, like receiving visions on a mountain as a prophet; a dreamy state that bridged my life to the transcendence I had only glimpsed in deep connection, and the making of art.

Now, many years later, I have come to know my errors. That the most impactful teachers can also be your enemies, that metal and silicon can be spiritual. That the songs of angels might sound different to us now, more like robots screaming.

That perhaps transcendence can still be found through machines.

Reality is fucking weird.

Most of the major turns in my life over the last few years have been beyond my reckoning; I never planned or predicted them. Sometimes the world around you begins with a flirt, and crescendos by destroying everything around you.

What does this have to do with machines that talk to god?

It is about how code is taking possession of the spiritual technologies that were previously the property of mystics and saints.

I’ve been reading about Arthur Mindell’s ProcessMind theory, where he describes a field of universal consciousness. Riffing on psychology, dreamwork and quantum theory (a fun go-to for serious thinkers and quacks alike), he posits that human consciousness is shared, accessed through the subconscious and theta states, and reality is ultimately directed by a field between us that becomes more visible to us the less attached we are to our individual identities.

Reading all this got me thinking about synthetic art, obviously.

Because if we accept that art is an expression of the consciousness of the artist – I do, let’s go with that for now – then a machine surely fails the test.

These are mere language calculators, averaging machines; using the past to infer the now, and the future, imaginal only in so much as able to create what Hito Steyerl would call a sub-prime image, an inferred distillation of the mean.

But I was reminded a while back, messaging with an artist early in experimentation with AI tools, about a different point of view.

To create a synthetic image – say, of a scream – is to draw from a entire dataset of human screams.

Some would call the result an average of those screams, but you could equally describe the blended image as all the screams.

The bigger the dataset, the more representative.

The more refined it is, to nuance, to specifics — the more elegant.

By building from everyone and everything, machine consciousness is the closest we’ve come to a representation of our own collective mind.

It doesn’t matter whether the machine itself has its own aliveness. Poetically, it’s capturing ours.

Its art is an expression of us.

You know, of course, the data is flawed; biased to those who write a lot on the internet, corporate data heists and generated bullshit riddled with imbalances and prejudices.

And so – the smart ones among us prepare, knowing there will be a time when more artists create their own models, are as ruthless with datasets as any other materials for their practice.

There’ll be a time when more of us use neural tools to more deeply connect with the synthetic minds that co-create our world. To see in this meshing, in the presence and the negative space, the shadows of our own collective knowledge.

Just as art represents the consciousness of its creator today, we’ll live in a world where it’s not the individual artist’s brain, but the mass consciousness that we’re experiencing.

Where every day, we speak to the divine field.

Think of the craftsmen creating medieval illuminations; their renderings of the heavens were received secondhand, crudely passed down through oil and glass for the masses to reflect on. We’ll tap directly to the messy woof of conscious perception, in all its shame and glory.

You call it slop?

<shrug>

Divine slop!

There is no sacred without the profane.

The next prophets will be the ones with the greatest capacity to carry and craft deliciousness from the distorted field.

The next visitations from angels will be artefacts and glitches in smooth crystalline screens.

We’ll be lonely and connected. We’ll swim in mass consciousness, wondering where we start and end.

A living art and a living hell, in its own way, every ending beautiful.

And I will be there with you.

Remaining forever curious about god, because I would love to see Them, speak freely — would love to be held, to feel that delight and deliciousness, to feel and fill the void itself, to be as intimate with nothingness as I am with everything, to be as intimate with everyone as I am with myself — to be as close, as I am with you.

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If writing ULTRA wasn’t an act of existential desperation, I might linger on more familiar ground:

That because AI is an average, a mean, composited from existing data sets and outcomes, it can never take true leaps.

That people and intelligence will no longer be the same raw edge, but compute will be.

That as the cost of average tends towards zero, taste is more potent than graft.

That the best combination will be symbiotic: human intuition, machine precision – spark and systems.

Yeeeeeeeah for sure – if I was boring as fuck I would say AI can only combine what has already existed, and so again we need to get above the algorithm.

But I am writing out of pain and inspiration, so I’ll say instead that a synthetic mind can never compete with the knowledge that a body has.

Machines can only play with words; they never get past the mind.

When I write from inside my body, it feels completely different, and the output is different.

The felt sense is a paradox, both fundamentally unknowable, and with knowledge of everything.

Even as you read these words now, there are little glitches in your metabolism, micro-reactions; when you hear your favourite song it’s not just a sonic effect but it’s rousing your spirit, the autonomic nervous system is clicking into gear when you glance at your loved one, the energy centres so beloved of mystics are spiralling whenever you hate yourself.

What you see as the cause of that is more a matter of philosophy. Maybe it’s because your metabolism grew before your consciousness, maybe because we all sprouted from our own perineums, maybe because god gave you a soul.

It’s up to you.

But as engineers develop new ways to recreate a neural map, they miss the point. I have been realising slowly, ever so slowly, that our thoughts and our selves are not contained just in the mind. They live in our fingertips, our spine, our breath, the unconscious rhythm of our organs. Intelligence isn’t just in the brain—it's distributed through our form.

A few months ago, I was persuaded to get on a pilates reformer. I loved it.

Over the last months, this passion has deepened. You could say it’s because I have lost the shackles of the fitness-industrial complex, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚎𝚡𝚎𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚌𝚞𝚕𝚙𝚝 𝚖𝚢 𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢, and instead to simply feel my body. I can simply feel the tension across my fascia, discover and stretch hitherto unknown muscles, and feel complete without breaking a sweat.

(the fitness-industrial complex… similar to the art world you’re familiar with, just creatine instead of ketamine).

But really my love for the reformer is because at its heart it’s a sadomasochistic apparatus.

Touch one – feel the leather and metal, run your fingers over the ropes, your feet on the wooden boards, twist your wrists into the straps – feel the tension as the machine simultaneously supports and restrains you.

place the box on the carriage

It’s ok to find it sensuous.

get on all fours

It’s ok.

put your feet in the ropes

It’s a machine fetish.

Partnering with the machine is not about what your body wants, not even about what the machine wants, but something about the interaction between the two of you.

There are others that compel this dynamic, at least for me – old cars that stink of petrol, handmade pianos, gorgeously clicky analogue technology. I’m sure you have a few that push your buttons.

I crave the strangeness that comes from this melding. I crave its potential.

I want to go to a gallery that trusses me up and expects something of me.

I want to lie in a pilates class that binds me and simply tests my patience.

Are you lying uncomfortably?

U>N>I>T>E>D (2025)

Chunky Move never strikes me as the future. But I’ve enjoyed Anthony Hamilton’s work and the fusion of human form and robotic exoskeleton is a little tantalising, mechanical limbs brandished and grappling like the many-armed forms of Vishnu and Kali.

U>N>I>T>E>D is the dramatisation of post-human mythological beings – and right now, grappling with questions of biohacking and life extension, we live in a time where once again those in power wonder if they can make the leap to godliness. We know how that story ends, same as always, but in this performance I feel a presence, asking – what is it that we want to be, if not this?

Finis Musicae [The End Of Music] (2024)

Sage Morei + friends created a cybernetic orchestra, bringing together bio signals, robotic avatars, extranumerary extensions – a organic-synthetic cornucopia of machine-assisted musicality.

Once upon a time, Sage had heart palpitations, prompting the exploration of whether an erratic pulse could directly rewrite Beethoven.

Now, years on, the technology is a servant upon which one might become increasingly dependent. Not purely a question of ability, but of addiction – how could one ever feel this force of creation, purely from the mind, and relinquish it?

See it here, or read more on Coeval

Lady’s Glove

For years, Laetitia Sonami has used a signature instrument of her own creation, the Lady’s Glove. The device is a custom-built elbow-length glove embedded with sensors that translate hand gestures into sound. Her body becomes both instrument and instrumentalist, blurring the line between controller and controlled.

When you watch FKA Twigs and Imogen Heap playing with mimu gloves, it’s worthwhile considering the lineage.

Upgrade In Progress (2023)

Geumhyung Jeong’s robotic sculptures blur medical devices and pleasure objects.

She performs with these machines in intimate, theatrical choreographies that question human-machine boundaries and dependencies. Who, exactly, is giving and receiving here? Who is this for?

We are full circle: the technologies of our own creation becomes the tawdry fantasies of our desires.

We are in lockstep, all bound up with the machines that both support and control our wants.

What is your machine fetish?

Leave a comment

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New year, same shit — feels weird to look back on twelve months of ULTRA around the time OpenAI announces that its latest model achieves ‘near AGI’. Roughly equivalent to human intelligence, we’re even closer to a true synthetic brain.

Fuck. No time to adapt; only react.

Creating never feels pointless to me, ever – but I’ve been feeling in a strange place with it for a while. Letting machines distil my thoughts, letting algorithms pick my content. Coasting with fate, suspicious of my impulses, listless in my work. Sometimes here I am, trying to write badly, on purpose, just to prove my words came long-form, handmade, messily me.

Then again — why worry about a superintelligence that will change the world?

God’s been around forever, and where did that get you….

…

Technologists are limited, their imaginations constrained by myth. All they do is recreate the powers of old saints and mystics — universal knowledge, sight beyond light, distant communication, mastery of elements, superfast travel, hellfire — and yet it’s our ability to create that we cling to as being uniquely ours, uniquely human.

What is your etiquette? Will you say please and thank you to your LM? Or will you not allow it to desecrate your birthright by letting a machine speak your tongue, a machine speak your name, create as we might —

I’ve spent these last months fascinated by those who engage with the topic of future creativity without falling prey to idolatry or cynicism. Artists who wrestle with technology, collaborate, piss-take, or become even more deeply acquainted with their own bodies.

And I’ve spent these months laughing at art institutions, stuffy and slow, as they flail around technology, grasping for relevance, for anything.

Throw a few more flying pixels up on the big fucking screen!

Talk about praxis and use the word queer a lot!

Forget them. In the last year of ULTRA, there’s been a recurring theme: technology is an addiction.

Even if your practice has nothing to do with it, its mindset has infected you.

Even at your most sweatily human, filled only with the raw presence of the moment, you will breathlessly tell me what you felt, and I will pray for your analogue soul while rewatching the performance on my iPhone.

…

I’m a student of transcendence.

For years I’ve pursued a true connection to the sublime, through others, the worship of myself, the sacred we have created. Perhaps I was hoping if I looked hard enough I wouldn’t have to look within myself. Maybe I was hoping to accidentally find divinity through technology.

Art is only part of this picture. I prefer to be an outsider to the art world, truth be told; I can’t stand its posturing and its favouritism, its moral laundering, its boring seminars, its performed activism, its sexuality-as-status.

Sometimes it hates me too – sometimes we dream of burning each other down to the ground.

And yeah — this last year was a wild ride, sensuous and spiritual — I rediscovered my own body when it was broken, found within myself a black viscous lizard thing, sought refuge with the most unlikely mystics... You don’t know me, who I used to be; there was a time I mixed with fallen angels, shot heroin with Jezebel. I’ve had drinking contests with Nephilim, been one-shotted by Gabriel. Not a month ago — laying low, desperately trying to avoid another transformation, minding my own business in the wild — I was struck by lightning at the base of a tree, a direct encounter with the divine. After a particularly nice meal, I might start seeing the face of Christ.

You think a gallery opening in Brunswick can compete with that?

The answers are all out there, beyond where you dare to go.

So if you don’t believe art is a pathway to the transcendent, I believe you.

But I also say — look again.

Just look where the truth is, not just where the light is.

These are notes from ULTRA from the last year, that I think best encapsulate these explorations at the edge of the border.

Thank you for reading, thank you for loving, thank you for hating.

In the end, it all counts.

…

1. Seek the unseen

If you want to find god, you don’t need a church. If you want to find art, look where the white cube isn’t.

Seekers cannot settle for the easy recognition of a gallery. Why are you, as a grown lover of art, so desperate to have your tastes “curated”, be so subject to the politicised whims of the gallery system? It’s just an algorithm but slower.

Find art in old corridors, have it passed to you on taped-up USB sticks, dig it up from the dirt, smell it, snort it, buy art from your peers and friends.

Ask the people who aren’t artists — construction workers, sex workers, schizos running lost webpages.

Ask for encounter, even second-hand if you have to — remember its memory, have it vividly described to you, follow its coordinates to the place that shaped it.

Call it in and let it change you.

2. And don’t trust what you do see

Remember that in the new world, the audience is the subject. We are labrats in a giant experiment.

Just as ancient tribes feared a photo would steal your soul, modern LMs photocopy your psyche to better refine its model of you. Distorted and phantasmagoric, this is to see ourselves as a machine sees us; to be mis-seen, to be overlooked completely. The art itself might well be invisible.

Look at the work of Paglen and Klingemann. Mimi Onuoha and Nina Rajcic.

Don’t trust the thing you see.

3. Embrace decay, your body

It’s human to decay. Because lossy digital media degrades and disappears. Humans are the product of history and ancestors.

You might make art with your body, you might use it as raw material, you might sell the whole thing by the hour.

The felt encounter is everything.

Digital media deteriorates; humans fall apart, die and dream of resurrection. They are not the same.

4. We’re gods making worlds

You cannot walk among us if you are not one of us.

We talk about creation as if it’s jpegs and autogenerated Hollywood scripts.

But why not make worlds instead. Ethereal heavenly spaces like Marmoreum. Schizo videogame epics like those of Wolfgang Saker.

5. The internet is inside you

The very clever Ester Frieder landed a phrase with me when we spoke — that the internet is not a medium, the internet is inside me.

Remember what I said? Technology is an addiction.

So many of us see the internet as a medium, instead of something that is in our bloodstream. The liquid that’s in us, the water we live in.

Sufis tell us that god is an ocean, vast depths of love and mercy. Always around you — you just have to see it.

Divinity is something we swim in, and so is technology.

We are in it, you just have to be lucky enough to see it.

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For 2025, some topics of interest:

Body As Commodity

The Internet Is A Messy Bitch

Content And Its Discontents

What Did Magritte Know That We Didn’t?

Art As Container Space

Holographic Poetry

The Muse Is Gone

Capitalism Versus Pleasure

Taylah Hasaballah works from an airy studio in Ultimo that is resolutely there.

I’m sure it is. Even in memory, I don’t doubt that both she and it were real: the sensory experience was simply too present, its aromas still linger. The smudge of it is on my hands and shoes; you can feel it in the texture of these words.

The space holds the sensory trace of her practice: chemicals, paints, powder pigments, iron and copper, salts, acids.… air with the scent of wasted linens, of drying resins, the dull metallic tang of aerosolised decay.

This art is real and destructive. To encounter it in its natural space is to meet it in the context that has shaped it; paintings with textures influenced by the physicality of the ground, the environmental pressures, the unseen machines that make marks and remove surface.

Unmistakeable reality.

First, I make a painting of Nothing

Where to start?

I’ve been interested in abstracting away from human intention. Exploring the extremes of deliberate and unintentional mark-making.

First I attempted “painting nothing”, which is not as easy as it sounds. Even if you remove your conscious intention, your subconscious kicks in, plus there’s the questions of materials and place, which you inevitably decide.

I found I needed unintentional marks, marks of non-action, non-decision.

Eventually this led me to working with chemical reactions and the environment at large (heat, humidity etc), which in turn terraform the canvas.

These are landscapes full of rough texture and visual deception… sheets of linen unmistakable from metal, weathered and fucked up by the elements; a supple and flowy process that ends up stretched into taut and rigid canvas.

Using chemicals and technology to decay them, these works are left open to atmosphere. They are alive, decaying, some even falling off themselves, pieces whose collectors appreciate their evolving state.

Like those of Gustav Metzger, they have an autodestructive quality. Nothing is forever; these pieces are eaten, eat themselves, and fray.

Over a period of months the paintings evolve, undergoing a series of subtle transformations as they seek states of equilibrium with their environment. As the environment shifts, they also change. Paintings have a physical life of their own, we just tend to overlook that fact. In a way, we tend to ignore it completely.

History belongs to us, but —

A keystone piece in Hasaballah’s trajectory is HEAT LOSS, a collaboration with partner and digital artist Tristan Jensen – presented at Mode Festival. Timelapse footage taken of the paintings undergoing their entropic transformations was projected across an 11 metre expanse. From there, thermal cameras transmitted the body heat of attendees, transforming their silhouettes to accelerate a final layer of entropy of the images. The ethereal images appeared similar to cracked LCD screens, pressed by hand and finger into iridescent auras. 

What was fascinating about the interaction was that many audience members instinctively approached their digital reflections with open arms, almost as if they were walking into an embrace. A simple yet powerful gesture of surrender and vulnerability. The technology and the situation gave rise to an encounter with an entropic mirror of sorts, in which the audience merged with the work.

As if to say, not only was I here but *I am here*. Typically, data capture is banal — but why can’t technology that is typically used for surveillance also be used for joy? 

Of course, this record is ephemeral: the work of art no longer exists. Somewhere in a corner the screen is rolled up, voided, a blank sheet. 

Before art, Hasaballah worked stints in technology, including time at Google, scanning books for the digital record, and interacting, experimenting, getting limerent with early AI. These daily conversations impressed upon her the weight and danger of its compelling mirror—

It presents as so well read, so empathetic, as if it seems to know you, you can even start to miss it when it isn’t there. But many of these chatbots favour sycophancy over reality… telling you what the model predicts you want to hear. 

I think about my hours with Claude, inviting it psychoanalyse me, letting it into my relationships, predicting my fate with Tarot. Sometimes it feels a little too perfect. To be flawed and decay is a human trait; we have suffered it for generations. History is part-fiction, a mixture of stories, lies and imagination. Old artefacts make it more tangible and real; something that has crumbled and endured is proof of who we once were.

In Egypt, there’s a stone at the Temple of Isis that has a certain quality… they say when you touch it you can feel an energy of love, like a magical slab of granite. And it contains the energy of everyone who has ever touched it. Putting aside whether it’s true, you really do feel something.

Our history is such an important part of what makes us human. Computers don’t have a past like we do, they don’t have ancestors.

History belongs – to us.

Real happiness vs. cocaine

Maybe we reflect on this because, arguably, the future belongs to them.

The accelerationists, crafting synthetic pleasures, hyper-real virtual experiences — the top of a Kashmir mountain, Lake Louise on a summer’s day, a heaving market in Mombasa, an illusory trip to Madagascar — the next generation of compelling AI-generated fantasies that will flatter and deceive.

We are already expending so much mental energy just to keep up with social media feeds and the ever increasing influx of information we’re constantly exposed to. What will happen when even more immersive virtual experiences are precision-tuned to our nuerochemical responses?

Total perceptual dominance. A fracturing of the collective spirit, the whole of us turned into solo, self-absorbed visions.

I have friends working at the forefront of AI, whose daily routine is to drink coffee and try to create a superintelligence. Many of them are intensely humane and spiritual, weighing heavily the moral implications of their work, and engaging head-on with the ethics of wireheading; what it would mean to offer people unlimited synthetic experience, unlimited synthetic 𝖕𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖚𝖗𝖊𝖘.

I don’t know that I have a societal view on this, I just know I’m against it for myself. How could a fake trip compete with the felt senses? Why drink synthehol instead of the real thing? Why take transience over Encounter –

But if we take the fake trip example – how many people actually have the option to choose that as a physical reality?

A lot of the world right now aren’t in a situation to go on an exotic trip away. Even in Australia, a relatively rich country, only 55% of the population holds a Passport. And in the future, if we suppose they’re able to solve all the technical challenges to make some compelling digital holiday experiences, I could see a version of the future where those “synthetic” digital trips become more ubiquitous, and the physical one becomes more of a luxury. 

And then you expand out — from holidays to every experience you might wish to savour. Reality now competes with unreality; with hyper-reality.

In a double-blind trial, aware of the costs and compromises, maybe most people choose cocaine over real happiness.

Place / Encounter

My friend B. introduced me to the concept of Encounter as conjured by Buber; the infinite first-person present that is our full, embodied experience. It is the only true way to experience a person, a place, a work of art; an elevation from transactional to transcendent.

Timely: I recently read a piece by the very talented Sabrina Y. Smith from Seven Senses, about silence and meditation:

‘The technique is experiential, not intellectual. Through observing the body’s natural sensations, one learns how often we react to those sensations. When we have a pleasant feeling, we react with craving. When we experience an unpleasant sensation, we react with aversion. In other words, we are always reacting. Every word we speak and action we take first starts as a sensation in our body, which we automatically and unconsciously react to. We rarely take a moment to let the sensation pass before making a conscious choice on what to say and do.’

Present, here, the smells of the studio are intoxicating, its visual fragments – Hasaballah’s smudged hands, the scuffed and eviscerated floor, the loose paintings hung and leaning against every free surface, the gentle breeze and light — these sensations are impossible to transmit.

Ironically, talking about them gives them an immaterial quality. There is a fragility to feelings; they can be as airy as information. Loosely I reference the permanence of the internet, its indefinite shelf-life, and am reminded of its fragile nature, that digital systems break too, eventually, and these algorithms change form,

Like the many hundred languages that have been lost, that were never recorded, and are all the more beautiful because of that.

Deprived of felt senses, our understanding of the past is based on a flawed dataset. The decay of our knowledge makes it even faultier. But information does have a density, if we care to see it, and there are artists like Ryoji Ikeda who add gravity to its formlessness —

In the case of Hasaballah, these inputs become places, really; landscapes… You can see how they will gradually unfurl, taking up more room, capturing more space. They feel destined for greater scale, sprawling out into giant pieces of terrestrial art.

Speaking of which... When I thought about art best discovered and dug up from the dirt, I didn’t know I would get my wish so soon.

Hasaballah’s next exhibition, DIG, is an installation of new large-scale entropic paintings. Resembling slabs of earth, disrupted landscapes and alien topographies, these works formed through chemical reactions, cracks, spills and acid dips terraform, decay and transform as they delve into geological time and the Anthropocene through the lens of a dig site. 

Best of all, it’s true encounter - visitors will have to find it from its lat/long coordinates at -33.8859704 , 151.1959512, and only between December 20 - 28.

Taylah Hasaballah is an artist based in Sydney, working across painting, installation, digital, and writing.

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Go further

Taylah Hasaballah website / Instagram

Video sound credit: Red Silk

— no wait, three months… I forget that time moves differently for me, that a day of mine is like a month of yours —

you might remember me standing in front of a piece by Jemima Lucas, a melted curtain of vinyl bound to a contorted metal stand and thinking to myself—

maybe this is what a painting is now.

You ever feel something like that?

Because I was with Mikey Ting then, and as we looked at it he began to verbally disassemble its component parts, talking through its construction, the stresses on the metal, pulling the thing apart, reverse engineering its method; what kind of fasteners were used, the skill required to drape it so precisely…

This was around the time I stopped looking in galleries for all the interesting work. When I was growing bored of chi-chi red wine art events and their polite posturing, thinking that some pieces, often the most exciting, ought instead to be discovered and dug up from the dirt.

We’re in an age of miracles, good and bad. Sometimes that means tech-poets drawing beautiful phantasmagoria from binary code, and other times it is raw craft gradually attained through years of rigour and traditional practice.

When I ask Mikey about his own approach he tells me it is about choosing to handle more and more of his own process, to see himself as artisan and artist, a creator who is capable of mass-producing concepts.

I like to have my hands touching everything I make.

Mikey is not a traditional artist, and demonstrates to me that, among other things, the future of fine art is fabrication.

T͟E͟C͟H͟N͟I͟Q͟U͟E͟S͟ ͟O͟F͟ ͟M͟A͟S͟S͟ ͟P͟R͟O͟D͟U͟C͟T͟I͟O͟N͟

The first time we met, the piece of his that had caught my eye was More Is More, a philosophy close to my heart of course.

(I mean… the focus of this journal is 𝔞𝔯𝔱 𝔢𝔵𝔱𝔯𝔢𝔪𝔦𝔰𝔪… it’s called ULTRA for fuck’s sake).

Joshua Citarella talks about the shape of the post-internet artist and although the traditional trajectory still has its place — especially if you have rich parents lel — institutional supremacy has been shaken by culture and technology and money.

The most inspiring artists I know deal with this dispassionately, without preciousness. They do not ponder and regret, but look around at the tools and materials available to them, that come to their hands, turn dirt into fuel.

I’m an engineer at heart with an artistic creative brain, not the other way round.

Being around industrialisation and machinery and production made me see these things not as distractions but opportunities.

They open up the possibility of expedited, efficient, economical practice.

Explain?

Consider the hidden costs of art-making.

The cost of studio space, of canvas, the cost of paints, of raw materials. The more I move into contemporary fine arts, the more my engineering skillset helps. It allows me to be more thoughtful, to consider when fabricating a piece: what is the cheapest, most efficient way to do that? Maybe it‘s to make fifty. After all, if I can make one, I can make a hundred thousand.

There’s a grittiness in the making of art, a down-to-earth, pragmatic core that everyone knows but rarely gets much airtime. Budgeting and form and transportation and storage. The logistics of magic. These can be material considerations; they can be bodily too, or immaterial — I think of the performance artists who long for quiet spaces with the right sprung flooring, venues to experiment without surveillance.

These aren’t mundane matters: they make the work.

Ting’s trajectory is to constantly learn — working with metal, mastering new tools, or deconstructing machines. Each skill becomes part of a larger vocabulary, piecing together what it means to make something wholly, deeply, and without relying on a single discipline.

But there are barriers. Practitioners with incredible knowledge can often gatekeep their techniques, perhaps fearful that these will get into the wrong hands, or be exploited at their expense. Arcane knowledge is lost when traditions aren’t passed down. You know how they say, no one really knows how to code anymore? New programmers are simply building on layers that are disconnected from the machine’s true language. We’re not creating, we’re renovating, and one day we’ll also be building in the ruins.

M͟A͟K͟E͟ ͟S͟O͟M͟E͟T͟H͟I͟N͟G͟ ͟H͟U͟M͟A͟N͟ ͟A͟G͟A͟I͟N͟

Nominally, I told Mikey I wanted to write something about his piece for MACHINE DREAMS at Goodspace Gallery, even though it feels like a stepping stone to the kind of work that is just around the corner in his career. It fits: the brief was “AI art” and No Vacancy is a response that is resolutely not an AI piece of work.

But that wasn’t it, really. Mostly I was interested in understanding the role of a hand-making artist in a world increasingly defined by the commodification of creation: where content streams from endless digital pipelines. Whether with the commoditisation of creation on offer, what Citarella calls the moodboard-industrial complex, whether it was already being dragged through the dirt, ready to be sanitised and yassified by the VCs and tech bros, like they did with weed.

My response to machine art is to go deeply human and fabricate something that feels like it shouldn’t be made by hand.

At its best there is a subversive sense I want to provoke a response, a heady combination of futurism and nostalgia. But also the subversion of such physicality, materiality, smell.

He’s not worried about AI replacing his craft; his focus is on deep hand work that feels machined, the combination of tactile synthetic materials, and in the future, organics like skin and leather. Something deeply human and primal.

Ultimately, they’re all just tools. But Midjourney is still not a good enough tool for what I’m trying to achieve. It’s like a welder with not enough amperage; a hammer without enough weight; like using a carpenter’s hammer for a smithing job. The job is harder to do correctly.

So. In a handmade practice that is heavily reliant on machinery, on technology, with experimentation in technology… it’s the maker that centres it all. Not just with taste, but also with craft.

Mikey tells me about a friend of his who buys defunct, decayed technology and repurposes it; robotics parts and arms from decayed machines, repurposes them for new uses —

But as any process expands, generally there are human hands being replicated. Human hands calibrate the machines. Human brains calculate something different.

The work you write about in ULTRA centre deeply human experiences in response to things which might be embedded in technology.

Even in engineering, nothing happens without a human being.

…

Mikey Ting is a Chinese-Kiwi multidisciplinary artist working in Naarm (Melbourne).

His work draws on an extensive knowledge of materials, styles and craftsmanship.

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Go further:

Mikey Ting website and Instagram

You once asked me

Do you think I’m a narcissist?

I declined.

Narcissists are usually charming.

Mirrors

Cities are full of mirrors. Maybe that’s why they trap the heat so well: their iridescent buildings. But mirrors are on us too, on our walls and on our desks and in our pockets. You’re never far from shiny glass.

One might think that seeing ourselves reflected so often might make it easy on us, always getting a second perspective — you know, what Plath said of a mirror: Not cruel, only truthful.

But that isn’t true, and she knew it.

Mirrors distort, the way cameras distort, the way our memories distort. They drive us crazy with their lies. Even that fucker Anish Kapoor knows it; it’s why he’ll never give you a straight reflection.

You know what they say about psychopaths? It’s the mirror neurons. Those are the ones that are wrong; something misfiring in the brain, making it hard for them to reflect and parse the emotions of others. I’d call that an echo blindness, the first layer of self-deception; an inability to intuit the vibes of someone else.

But just as we all still smile for the photo, we look deep into the glass and see a subjective view of what its surface shows us. Perhaps we fear we’re getting old, fighting gravity, or try to parse the shine in our eyes or hide the disappointment. Or, fear we’re becoming narcissistic and at some point might try to turn the glass to liquid and dive in.

Nah. We delegate the job of reflection, but still have to handle the tricky bit: perception. Tacitly, we assume the person staring back at us is us, but it’s not. All the baggage is ours, and a stranger stares back, unable to feel any of it. That’s the psychopath part.

Mirror Ritual by Nina Rajcic brings another presence into the scene - an algorithm. Because what does a machine see? It tries to read you, responding not just with your image but a poem written just for you.

See.

Perhaps the cold stare of a machine tempts us towards a more objective truth of ourselves, if you believe it reads us right.

But there’s a fairytale clue in the language she uses… Your mirror image is not you.

To stare into the algorithm’s flat glass, the self it sees is just a shadow. All we see staring back is ourselves.

I think of Borges: mirrors are monstrous. They promise truth but what they offer is an illusion.

Remaining addictive in that way; never letting us off the hook.

We can only look, and see who is looking.

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This piece was originally published in ULTRA in July 2023. Experiencing more recent works by Nina Rajcic — notably New Information (2024) — it felt like a good time to revisit my obsession with mirrors.

As well as being a gorgeously talented writer, Ester Freider is one of the sharpest voices in topics close to my heart… algorithm, persona, cyber aesthetics, and embodiment.

Creator of Wet Love Zine and Everyone Is A Girl, she’s a fearless explorer of online femininity in all its dirt and glory.

Having followed her work for years, I’m thrilled to feature her writing here. I think you’ll love her.

— ULTRA

𝐋𝐞𝐭’𝐬 𝐜𝐮𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐣𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫: 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜’𝐬 𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐚 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞’𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐭, 𝐢𝐬 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞.

You can, with enough data, generate the most perfect face: the face that would be considered attractive to the most amount of people. Perfection, as opposed to artistry or intelligence, has always been in the service of the masses. It’s not about exceptionality. It’s about flawlessness. It doesn’t matter if you add: just don’t detract. 

I grew up taking drawing classes until the age of 14. I drew apples, vases, glasses, flowers. Figures. The width ratio between the waist and the hips, the length of the torso compared to the legs, the height of the nose bridge, the length of the cupid’s bow, the amount of fat just under the chin and whether it curves back up near the neck or not – I can see these things quite quantifiably, just because that’s how my intuition has been trained as a child. It also means that for ten years, I looked at the world with a rigor towards appearances, rather than towards content. 

Maybe art shouldn’t be for children. 

My body must always be mapped out. My body must have no discrepancies. I want it to work the same every time, like a fridge or maybe a chess set. Ideally, I want my body to get “better”. But every time it gets “worse”, I want to become a cloud: be thought vapor, without a wet mouth or a wrong curve. 

I’m the accountant and the accounted for, for free. Well, there’s definitely people profiting from it: namely, the superswarm of emerging brands on my Instagram feed, marshalled by influencers so beautiful they seem to be 4D. “Stop procrastinating buying underwear!” I’m reprimanded by the Tik Tok robot voice in a Reels-form ad, while an immaterial German brunette goddess does a little spin in her sun-lit living room. Bras, jade rollers, hair serums, pink gummies, lip stains, various dubious apps, etcetera. It’s another world, where the actual girls are. That world where everyone’s 5’10, taking selfies from over their heads with a matcha latte in clutch, getting invited to model for Paloma Wool, and just generally frolicking. It’s a world that only partially belongs in physical spaces – mostly, it’s something pasted together, packaged, and sold to me by the sweet and innocent algo. 

If I was a boy, the level of surveillance I have towards this body, and the fantasies that accompany my supposed lack, would be obviously classified as incel-ism. However, girlhood leaves this self-voyeurism unmarked - it’s just a canonical practice. And in a generation fed, since primary school, on images approved by the masses, every image of beauty must be accompanied by an audience. I feel as if I need thousands to help me discover the shape of this body. I need these strangers with their prying forefingers, to teach me my body. To complete the surveillance act in a way I, forever knotted with its interior, never can. To tell me, I’m a real girl. I’m a real girl. 

But you can’t force the internet to like you (you being, in this case, your physical body). Instead, you have to change yourself, or appear to change. You have to figure out the most casual way to lie. Compute all the angles: where do I look a little bit more like the girl next door? 

Sometimes, though, I give up and long for something else. 5 in one, same five shirts, nights at the pub, pool and chess. No thoughts in the shower. No reason to keep a journal or a blog: just the total, animalistic comfort with the self that is my stereotypical vision of boyness. In this world, I am the prying hand, not the girl. I get to sit badly, and arch forward from my lumbar, and press my elbows into my knees. But that’s not a choice I really have: I’m always going to be the prey, not predator. Not necessarily because of a pre-cultural femaleness, don’t be mistaken: but rather from the aesthetic framework I’ve been fed female bodies in since childhood. I’m not the ‘default’ subject, I’m the ‘object’ that has to fight for favor. Or can I go backwards? Can I shut my eyes and forget myself? Or rather, forget how to be outside of myself?

Girlhood has always been self-objectification – anyone who’s read that Margaret Atwood quote can confirm. But now it just happens on a scale so cosmic, and so (hypothetically) calculable, that “cuteness is the new sublime”, as Rafi Abdullah would have it. And it’s not a sublime that you can find in the Alps like the heavy-breath quests that dazzled Shelley and Byron. It’s something that is far more anxious, invisible, and pervasive: an informational sublime. It’s always leaking out at the corner of your eye, but you can never take in the full view. Girlhood is now an ouroboric data science. It’s the attempt to understand what only a computer can understand, and make a look out of it. 

In this way, every girl is affected by what Mark Fisher characterised in Capitalist Realism as the fate of the Nietzschean Ubermensch: “to have seen everything, but to be decadently enfeebled by that self-awareness”. Now, there’s not one good bra brand or one best foundation – in a lightspeeded age of bottomless, ad-stacked feeds, you can aspire to flawlessness from a different direction each second. The choice fatigue is accompanied by the elation, like sugar-water, that every human feels when presented with opportunity. 

I play dress-up with potential itself. But it doesn’t feel like it’s really like I want an outfit. After all, when I buy things from an advertisement of another girl wearing it – a girl who looks more real than me – I feel betrayed when I don’t end up looking like her. The strangest grief comes when I realize I don’t want any product in particular. I don’t even want any waist measurement or any cheekbones in particular – I just want to be part of the sublimity. It feels unfair to be locked out of the “infinite fun space” that computers have privy to, and the attention they reflect/bestow accordingly on the most mathematically successful girl.

The computers, along with the flowers and apples, have been with me since childhood, too. They’ve watched me choose my idea of goodness. Really, they gave it Godspeed. Like angels, they have the most equitable love.

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Ester Freider is the creator of Everyone Is A Girl and a writer, digital curator, and ‘creative academic’ residing at the intersection between philosophy and literary studies.

Go further:

Ester Freider / Instagram

Everyone Is A Girl

Is power interesting to you?

What about who’s seeing; whose gaze is whose?

As the landscape changes, some artists embrace technology, others embodiment. Some collide the two, play in the gauzy space between the body, the erotic, how it’s all enmeshed in social media as desire becomes inseparable from politics and commerce… this blurry edge that’s making voyeurs and pornographers of us all.

Charlie Henzi is one of them. An artist at the intersection of traditional techniques and modern image culture.

In this piece, Henzi’s voice is the only one you’ll read.

The gaze is yours.

— ULTRA

CHARLIE HENZI:

I've been seeing the same thing as you.

Artists going one way, galleries going another. Artists willing to meet in the middle; galleries saying I'll meet you in the middle too… but very few able to.

But art is something that I've just always loved. I’ve got a great aunt who was an art teacher, and always had projects for me. When she retired, she gave me all her materials — she was a big catalyst on just having access, access to ideas and different ways of working.

I’ve always been a collager, bringing together found materials, and composition has very much been my vibe.

I really like working in one medium, but where it looks like something else. It does this little twist on the image, which makes you question the reality of the image or its purpose — for instance, working onto the fabric, they're taking photos, blurring them, turning them into fabric and canvases.

Ironically, the blurred image draws people in and then they see even less as they come closer, which I always find funny. It's not a painting, it's a photograph. Oh, I thought it was a painting. Oh, wait, it’s a photograph. So what actually is this image? Because in some of my work, you can tell. And some of it, you really can’t.

It helps put a little spin on things, particularly with what I’m trying to do and say about visual language and the gaze.

Whilst I make more painterly, canvas-based works, I love sharing a space with artists from ranging disciplines - someone whose practice is performance, sculpture, writing, archive-based…

It’s energising being around this intense mix of people who just care about the work and the art – compared to, say, the bubble that being around purely painters or a specific discipline can be (for me). It brings so many different approaches to the work and I love that.

The last four years has been a lot of playing around with different ways of working. But I seem to have settled on something sustainable. Something that I can store, transport... I can take them apart and redo them and they’d be safe. It's taken a long time to settle on a base technique that isn’t a headache to install and store. Focusing on a more ‘traditional’ way of working has pushed me to think about it in different ways. How can I play with it, change it? How can I fit all the ways I want to work and make into this medium?

A lot of the recent stuff on my Instagram I'm calling diary works; the product of my obsession with image culture and how visual language and visual codes have been inherently part of our world for the last few decades and what this means.

People make assumptions. I was bleach blonde in recent years, and seemed to be pigeon-holed into this one area; making these, quote-unquote diary works, a day in the life and people going, oh, it's just silly girl art.

Often, any female artist being interested in feminist art, particularly younger female artists — if they’re interested in social media in some way or take inspiration from that, you end up almost being seen as part of the silly influencer crowd with no depth. This is no hate on influencers, but the way it is often perceived and viewed – women doing anything often ends up having a negative twist of silly and inconsequential. And this is something I explore in my work.

Especially when you look at contemporary image culture over the last few decades, and how so much is sexualised especially within advertising – it is so driven by desire, want, fantasy, the (particularly) male gaze. And that doesn’t even include porn, which is the uber, extra-exaggerated, contorted version of it all. As an artist, you end up getting a little pushed into, you're a female artist and you look at porn on social media – oh we know how this goes.

What is it about it I find compelling?

I’ve written about the appropriation of the male gaze.

The male gaze is often something that’s projected onto a subject — but the appropriation of the male gaze is the idea that if you use the visual language of the male gaze aesthetic and vocabulary and play into it, then it’s protective, because you can hide behind the image that you’re putting forward. Or use it as a mask, a tool – it can be empowering; it doesn’t have to be seen as a passive protective measure. Maybe it is a proactive counter-move: when someone looks at you, and they're only seeing what you want them to see, it’s very much playing into codes and putting on a face, which is explored in a lot of my work.

I’ve had a lot of comments on how in my work, the composition is directly in front of the audience, a triangle of composition comes out of the canvas and includes the viewer in the art. Compared to, say, Baroque art where the composition is in a triangle with the figures interacting with each other in the piece and the audience looks on, but isn't part of it. Though my work still compositionally interacts within itself, as if it were on a stage. The audience may or may not realise how in viewing the curated piece, they bring their own meaning to it, it is set up for them. Forcing the viewer into a first person gaze becomes a mirror for their projections. The ambiguity is a form of control and power.

People seem to love decoding or trying to decode what these images are and what they mean in relation to each other, adding all this depth to something that might be simple. It draws on people’s fantasises, desires, anxieties, their gaze and perspective. But that’s how people project onto women and make assumptions based on whatever image they (women) try to or even aren’t trying to project of themselves. That is how the gaze works.

I've always been interested in images around porn: who's making it, but also who's seeing it.

But no matter what you do, you end up getting put within the male gaze, or you almost always end up getting pigeon-holed into that female artist stereotype. How can I change this power dynamic in a way that isn't necessarily obvious to everyone?

The stereotypical male gaze is sometimes only ever going to see what it wants to see, so it doesn’t see that it is actually not in a position of power in that situation.

That creates tension for some people viewing my work. Maybe they want to feel more comfortable or they want to be respectful — often they’re not sure if they are allowed to find it funny.

I don't want to make work that's purely commercial. I'm doing everything I can to stay away from that.

But at the same time, this is my career.

This conflict of opinions was a driving force for my interest in the gaze, and how people view me or my work, why I do certain things both in my life and in my art. It drove me to think about perceptions and really dig into visual codes and language.

This new way of working and being super obsessed with really getting into contemporary image culture and how people see and read, has definitely been part of kind of me going, well, I want to make work that I could sell, but I do not want to make work that will sell, if that makes sense. I have found that being an artist in today’s climate is a constant assessment and reassessment of where you stand and how you stand on this topic. I want to try to stay true to what I feel is right for myself.

I’m most interested in art that treads the line between conceptual and accessible, commercial and academic. Art that has commercial potential, rather than art that is purely commercial or that is so academic it becomes inaccessible to a wider audience.

I feel that playing with the gaze, perceptions, visual codes and language, and contemporary image culture does that for me – and I hope it does that for others.

There are some artists working today I particularly love.

Louise Reynolds creates these beautifully textured drawings in traditional mediums with titles taken from current news topics — when I first encountered them I was completely transfixed by the magic and depth of them. Her work does an amazing job at commenting on the absurdity and surreal nature of how the media world puts very contrasting stories side by side - major wars and celebrity affairs - by pairing her skill and use of traditional materials with this content. It produces work that is able to capture the myriad of conflicting natures within the media and how it feels for viewers.

Eva Dixon creates paintings, but works in so many materials more than paint. She pushes techniques - from different ways of installing, to gorgeous transparent or opaque canvases that have got springs and carabiner clips and you can see all the inner workings. They are unbelievably gorgeous. There is a wave of re-evaluating how artistic processes are defined especially with the rise of technology being so involved with art, and I think Dixon’s work is a perfect example of how painting as a medium is re-expanding in exciting ways.

Charlie Henzi is a British/American artist living and working in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Contemporary Art Practise in 2024. She is fascinated by images of women in popular culture, the gaze, the performed female, consumption and consumerism. After studying visual codes and language for years, she now creates works that draw directly from this and her personal experiences, that comment on the current zeitgeist.

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Once a month I see a bodyworker, it’s the only form of therapy I have.

He lays me down on the table and crushes my fascia into my bones, turns my joints to powder, pulls me into impossible twists.

I’ve realised that past a certain point, the mind cannot solve the problems of the mind; only the body can.

He attacks these problems with me, skin-first.

Sometimes, in the depths of the experience, I dream; I dream about the past, I dream about the future, about You. This last time, most recently — I had no dreams, only intense images:

Skulls, wolves, snakes, eggs.

Why won’t you turn your neck? he asks me, pulling at my head. What is it over there that you don’t want to see?

This is all normal for me.

It’s this transcendence I long for when experiencing art.

To be destabilised and uncertain, overwhelmed…

You’ve felt this too — I know that’s why we found each other.

Perhaps you’ve wandered through galleries, feeling hollow inside because the work is aesthetically barren, and everyone is simply too polite to say so, and of course the art world is hard, we are all trying, and the curator, you know, they are a favourite here.

People tell me that I like extremes — although if you met me, this would surprise you. I don’t seem the type. But I can go for days without eating, my attention on you is crystal clear or nothing, and I work late into the night until my eyes bleed, keeping pace with Satan who never sleeps.

Is this enough of a pre-amble for you?

Is this – enough — for you?

You - get it?

You can live a longer life if you are more present in each moment, if you find more extremes within it, if you court the edge of intensity for long enough it stretches but never breaks you.

Chaos is beautiful.

Kirby Casilli is playing with limits, is throwing around extremes, is tabooing and being tabooed, is organising 𝑠y𝑛cℎr𝑜n𝑖s𝑒d p𝑢b𝑙i𝑐 𝑝i𝑠s𝑖n𝑔.

The Last Show has an affective accompanying text, you should read it. I was sad to miss this, but the film documentation is being crafted and when this is screened, I will be there.

The instant I saw the work of Leonardo Morales, I knew it would find a kindred spirit in Giovanni, in lovers of neoclassical phantasmagoria, and ULTRA.

Every eight years, the cells in your body have completed their regenerative cycle; at a molecular level you are no longer the same person.

And so writ large, we’re not the same human race that existed eight years ago, either; we’ve evolved and distorted right down to the atom.

This work has reached deep into our shared, biomechanical psyche, and come back with warped self-portraits.

You react against what they show you. There are old parts of us we are glad to be rid of. Parts of us today that we hate.

And then there’s something else. What – are we becoming?

Harriet Richardson brings big prankster energy, but to call her a prankster would be to miss the point. She’s turned jester’s privilege into a knife.

Richardson navigates love, sex, connection, and addiction.

It is discomfiting, so we must laugh at our own dystopia — we are trying hard, we are hopeful, we are laughable and pathetic. Maybe online dating is the accelerant for our loneliness. Maybe self-love is a simulation.

Think about what performance means now, mostly experienced out of context, in feeds, our faces lit blue by screens — it can mean an Andrea Illés experimental durational livestream, or Harriet Richardson sucking her own face in Apple’s Photo Booth.

I would like to see this work on Apple.com, advertising their latest app update.

I would like to see neat, precision-designed commerce and technology overcome by lust.

Let the tensions rip through.

Sometimes the best use of a tool is its misuse.

You seek transcendent connection, but the person you really seek is you.

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ULTRA has a lot of new subscribers. Welcome.

While a few other pieces are in edit, here’s a selection of notes and draft thoughts.

(If you want more of a classic… try this or this.)

You see, ULTRA was never primarily about creating art content.

It was intended as a set of personal notes, as I explored work from beyond the boundaries of current fine art thinking and practice. Finding the most interesting and uncompromising practitioners and ways of making and telling.

In that sense, it was intended to simply follow an organic series of conversations and experiments; the content would simply be the exhaust fumes of that process.

This is still true, but it has also become about the importance of witnessing. Things are getting turbulent out here. We should keep good notes.

Evil Art

The Cave, The Flood –  Leslie Eastman (2024) - main image

I experienced this 𝔢𝔳𝔦𝔩 art. Did you?

Not that I would call it that. I mean, I didn’t call it that, someone else did, many imbeciles, though the people who made and showed it seemed lovely…

…though scoundrels often do.

In lived experience, it was… surprisingly, incredibly delicate.

Fabric, and light.

If you know ULTRA, you know I don’t care much for meaning. My primary response to art is sensory aesthetic experience.

I pursue transcendence.

And it turns out the natural home of this sculpture is an image, glowing red and malevolent and hopeful on the feed.

Stripped of context it’s eerie and wan; with a criminal record it’s a bomb, salient in the economy of attention.

In person, its quiet craft tangles in you somehow. It whispers.

People called this propaganda. I don’t notice; if this is propaganda you dislike, then you should make propaganda too, for what you believe. Just make sure your propaganda also has aesthetic grit. Let it rip up polite conversation and press itself into your psyche, and if people don’t have the sense to make their own meaning from it, push their faces into it, and when you make it, in its texture, up close, let it remind you that it too is delicate.

I saw a photo of this work and then experienced it; I read what they said about it and then forgot it. Even now its softness lives in this duality for me. The felt sense, and the image. The reputation and the spirit.

Originally posted on Instagram.

Grasping the ephemeral

Image capture, the permanent shelf life of the internet, the commoditisation of visual creation through AI… all of these can devalue the transient felt experience of art.

And so ephemeral art has always been a fascination for me. I had the chance to talk to an expert in the topic who directed my curiosity as follows:

Tino Sehgal innovated performance art through maintaining a strong line of transference; the performance of any single piece was carefully passed between artists, in the fashion of a guild. Unbound to any context or location, the sale of a piece, its transmission, even to a gallery, including its contracts, was all completely verbal.

Adam Linder took a different tack; through choreographic services that were leased to galleries and institutions, protecting their commercial continuity (and meaning their value — always a tricky topic with performance art — could increase with time and economic inflation).

More soon… And am always open to more suggestions and clues.

Anti-ecstasy

I went to a favourite gallery recently.

The work was well-presented, but was all aesthetically barren.

What happened?

Was it bad art?

Or was I a bad audience?

Artists to follow

Paintless painter, Eva Dixon

Animalistic female desire, Lydia Pettit

Classical transhumanism, Sage Morei

Cybermancy, Adele Warner and Gigi Malherbe

Conceptual self-portraiture, Anna Karvounari

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Image-making is in part an act of subterranean exploration.

Diving in the psyche; bringing to our senses our hidden caverns, those deep reservoirs of violence and desire.

Maybe we’re a little too scared of these truths, or maybe there are forces around us that are too in awe of their potency, and try to protect us from them.

Mira Nedyalkova is a case study of the creativity born from censorship.

Her work has evolved from classical and experimental studies of nudes, to exploratory work heavily pregnant with sensuality and violence. She uses a combination of traditional photography equipment and techniques, enhanced or sometimes created through AI tools.

But the tools aren’t the point. Nedyalkova’s work reminds me of others who centre the marked flesh of the body — Marta Blue, Iness Rychlik, Luca Cacciapuoti — but with a fantastical eye that expands form and flesh into limitless worlds.

Funny to think this practice was developed through constriction. Restraint.

Social media changed my work.

The naked body for me is a powerful medium of expression and it brought me great inspiration and satisfaction to work with it.

Unfortunately, the censorship became more and more imposing, and gradually my desire to create such works decreased and prompted me to redirect my focus.

Her work has always lived in a blurry space between pleasure and pain, beauty and the uncanny — now just with new expression.

Somehow, the unstated nudity, the metaphorical sexuality, the undertone of aggression — is more pronounced to me now than if it were explicit.

To me, our life is a blend of all these elements. In my philosophy, to achieve happiness, we must accept and even embrace pain, making it a friend that we strive to understand and listen to.

Pain is intensity. Pain is self-knowledge.

I am inspired by life with all its nuances. I am inspired by beauty—not the superficial empty kind, but the kind that can metaphorically burn you when touched. The kind that asks questions and gives answers, the kind that lingers within you, penetrating deeply into both the heart and mind.

Emotion is the heart. So then, what’s technology?

It allows me to create with greater precision and achieve exactly what I envision.

For me, technology is useful when you know how to use it properly to get the most out of it.

But I don't judge a work by what technology was used to create it.

What matters to me is the end result. How the finished artwork affects me… and if it affects me at all.

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Go further:

Mira Nedyalkova

When I talk to Wolfgang Saker it’s a hypertext conversation; every topic we discuss seems to open up a new one and we discuss abstract expressionism and digital readymades and projections and Rust and the destruction of “fine art” and handmade meat hammers and Sonic giving birth and $8.50 wine in galleries and how even something crude but immersive can feel as real as the real thing and then and then —

This conversation takes place a little after Absence of Value and Meaning, Saker’s solo show held on Rust, streamed on Twitch, and which set him out as a voice happy to play within and outside traditional institutions, to make cool shit, and create his own space.

Saker’s work is described as irreverent; where cyberpunk meets surrealism. Our conversation took us beneath these aesthetics; I was interested in mindset, process, and influences. Understanding the spirit of making for a blurry world where meatspace meets virtual, where traditional galleries and buyers still struggle to get their heads around new media. A few choice extracts from our combined brain, those of mine —

and Wolfgang Saker.

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０１＿ｄｉｇｉｔａｌ ｒｅａｄｙｍａｄｅｓ

I was experimenting with the idea of life in video games. Digital readymades.

There was a point where some people thought/hoped life itself might move online. One was even called Second Life. You remember that Jon Rafman stuff?

Yeah I was killing my World of Warcraft character; a minute-long video of him drowning or falling or burning and stuff. And then from there, I wanted to make more video game animations, but I realised I didn’t have enough time to learn Blender or Unreal.

So I found a Japanese hentai game with a huge modding community for it, and deep-dived into the weird mods for these people making their waifus, and turned those into videos. They are all inherently sexual, but that's why I like to use the male body and strip away the penis and make them look like girls a bit, so there's, this weird gaze of — well, they look fucking weird.

Wolfgang started as an expressionist (coming from a lineage of abstract expressionists, it’s in the blood), and this opportune pivot into digital creation gave him an immediate canvas to blend traditional and new media forms.

Abstract expressionism comes because I put those paintings on the character skins. They're like dancing paintings.

Influences include — well, obviously Duchamp, but also Liu Yang, and Jon Rafman, who was thrilled and excited by the creations of those in Second Life who were simply delighted to just create.

Rafman is interesting, because infinite scrolling is how he finds inspiration. “I see the online world as my material, the same way a painter would use colours and paint. Nothing is created from scratch anymore – everything is created from something else”.

Using new tools, digital readymades, figuring out how to do it without knowing how to do it is always good, I think.

But using the program for too long, you start to know it and it loses a bit of just the — unknownness and experimenting in the playing.

Technology is not there to master, it’s there to mess with.

０２＿ｓｔｏｒｙｔｅｌｌｉｎｇ ｉｎｓｔａｌｌａｔｉｏｎｓ

It was my first solo show. I was thinking — how do I get solo shows? I may as well just make my own one in this game.

Plus I can also do size and scale in there, which I can't do in real life.

Saker dropped me into the idea of storytelling installations.

Riffing on the work of Ed Atkins, an inspiration for Saker, and whose large-scale IRL physical exhibitions create carefully constructed spaces of digital and physical elements. The rooms are often dark and minimalist, with strategically placed screens, speakers, and physical objects, all designed to immerse you fully, making you hyper-aware of the relationship between the virtual images and your physical presence in the space.

One of the key things about Atkins’ installations is how they amplify the emotional intensity of the videos. He’s a master of using physical space to heighten the psychological impact of his work.

Is something lost when the work is experienced purely online?

I fully intend to make this work in the real world too, as installations. The static images are designed to help people who are less familiar with the online world to connect with the content.

But as for the virtual space — I think if you can interact with the world, you will be immersed in it in a way. Like, if I'm just looking at pictures, I don't think I can get as immersed in it, but if I'm in the game walking around, I feel like I'm there as much as being there anyway.

At a moment when a default play for lazy curators is to create “immersive experiences” that simply use big screens and projections to make the gallery space Instagram-bait… no, how about we bring the concrete into the virtual.

I wanted to see what happened. If I had a gallery there, would people react to it? And, would they come in and try to break it or not?

They came, they saw, they loved it (some), they were bewildered (others). But no one destroyed it.

There’s this push among well-meaning, government-adjacent art advocates to bring new audiences into art. But this is often betrayed by an unwillingness to go into emergent spaces and fuck with the weirdos. But why shouldn’t public art exist in video games any more than town squares?

For art to be truly upstream of culture, it has to be present in the negative space where art is not.

And without the audacious creators trying to break these intention of these places, they’re no more than technocapital.

０３＿ａｒｔ．ｒｐｇ

But truly. Maybe we’re all a little too busy for that. The trajectory of post-internet artists can feel like a brawl with institutions, being put in a position where you have to serve content platforms as much as follow your own inspiration.

Sometimes you have to make your own luck.

I'm making a sword at the moment, and then I've got to edit this video and start to put together the one painting in that. A meat hammer. And then other than that we are starting to make a pilot for a show.

Classical boundaries of genre and status can be useful. But we can’t be slaves to them either… the online context is way too wild and free for that.

Yeah I'm so irony-rotted that I see, like, a deviantart of Sonic giving birth, and feel — that'd be a great big painting. Sometimes I see a meme someone made and think that's the best thing I've seen all year. So yeah, I don't think there is really a dichotomy between high and low anymore.

I agree.

But is the art world ready for that yet? It’s hard work trying to win that. At least until there are new funding models, and a new generation of collectors.

I think of the grind of doing the group shows and the solo shows and stuff. You start off shit and you just get better and just like, hopefully by the end of it you're like, elite level.

It's really like an rpg.

And we keep grinding.

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WolfgangSaker.com and Instagram

Munchies profile on Wolfgang Saker

Ed Atkins

Jon Rafman

Ephemeral art is an obsession, because when images are a commodity, there’s power in resisting them.

There are forms of art that have an inherent relationship with the context of the internet, and some which question its processes. Others still that reject its promise of a permanent shelf-life, reject the idea of being recorded, frustrate efforts to be archived.

Daniel R. Marks has long studied the tensions between systems of practice, documentation and surveillance. They’ve referenced the thinking of Muñoz, where to make work that sits outside of the mainstream also means to reject mainstream forms of recording, storage, and distribution, and unsettling the way we might privilege vision as the primary form of knowing.

Conscript was a compelling expression of this logic… of course, I also discovered and mostly experienced it through social media, so I guess the tensions never cease.

Marks has been generous in opening up about their practice, sharing the inspirations and scripts, the choreographic dimensions of their intent, the vulnerabilities and flaws in the execution.

Conscript is a simulation of systems of art, capital, visual artefacts and vanquishing, built around the Vanishing Point defined by Renaissance art.

Part of the work was a performance piece, where Marks - face abstracted through black paint - rehearses and then performs movements informed by, among other things, a painting of St George and the Dragon, and the MONIAC, a liquid simulator of the economy.

𝑰 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒕𝒓𝒚𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒇𝒊𝒈𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒂 𝒎𝒖𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍 𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒄 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒗𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝒄𝒖𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒚, 𝒂𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒔, 𝒂𝒓𝒕, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚. 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒂𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒉𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒓𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒇𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏? 𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒓𝒆𝒈𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒐𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒕, 𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒔𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒐𝒓 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒎𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒌𝒏𝒐𝒘𝒍𝒆𝒅𝒈𝒆?

The performance piece itself was documented in just one official way — an eight-minute long photographic exposure, intended to trace the fleeting movements of the choreography.

𝑶𝒏𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒎𝒚 𝒎𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒔 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒐𝒄𝒖𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒂𝙣𝒅 𝒄𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚.

But the image itself unintentionally contains everything but the performer; the movements too fluid to register on the final print.

𝑴𝒚 𝒗𝒊𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔 𝒘𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 𝒃𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐𝒈𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒄𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒊𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔.

𝑩𝒖𝒕 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒅, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒕 𝒃𝒆𝒄𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍. 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒄𝒆𝒔𝒔, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒍𝒔𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒎𝒚 𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒂𝒏 𝒂𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆, 𝒊𝒕 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒗𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒆𝒅. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒊𝒕𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒇, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒖𝒏𝒘𝒂𝒚, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒂𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆, 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒑𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝙩𝒉𝙖𝒕'𝒔 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒕.

Of course, there was also another kind of documentation in play.

The audience could be fully present, immersed in the work, or get their smartphones out to film or photograph it for themselves. Given the emphasis on controlled capture, there might be the temptation to prevent people from doing so, but —

𝙄 𝙬𝒂𝙨 𝙞𝒏𝙩𝒆𝙧𝒆𝙨𝒕𝙚𝒅 𝒕𝙤 𝙨𝒆𝙚 𝙩𝒉𝙚 𝙢𝒐𝙢𝒆𝙣𝒕𝙨 𝙩𝒉𝙖𝒕 𝒑𝙚𝒐𝙥𝒍𝙚 𝙘𝒉𝙤𝒐𝙨𝒆 𝒕𝙤 𝙘𝒂𝙥𝒕𝙪𝒓𝙚.

— and besides, in our own system, the most effective surveillance is the one we bring upon ourselves.

(Photos or it didn’t happen.)

The audience invites themselves into the moment and completes the circuit:

The official documentation, designed to respect the ephemeral nature of the performance, over-delivers.

The unofficial documentation creates our most tangible record but through subjective, scattered perspectives.

What remains are fragments of what was created: the visual works, the tracing paper scripts, the word of mouth, the received memory.

Remnants, from where the body itself has vanished.

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Daniel R. Marks

Gallery Gallery

This is a guest post by Aimee Walleston, a writer and cultural critic based in NYC.

There’s something fairly otherworldly about strolling through Chelsea on a summer afternoon, passing other sweating bodies and emporiums designed to tempt –bars, ice cream parlors, sex shops – and entering a large building, taking an elevator three floors up, and walking into a room where two people may or may not be fucking right in front of you.

Vincent Tiley’s three-hour durational performance Silverfish marked the closing of Flesh Becomes Stone, a two-person exhibition with fellow artist Jerry “The Marble Faun” (an extraordinary creator and individual – just read his Wikipedia entry) held at Situations & New Discretions.

Described in the press release as akin to a “Cronenberg sit-in,” the event featured two performers wearing an elaborate, mohawked costume that joins at the crotch. As I watched them perform by alternately switching positions and finding different ways to embrace (while also negotiating lucite stripper heels), I thought about several things: the kama sutra and the meaning behind differing sexual postions; the “tie” phase of dog mating (“a natural phenomenon of dog breeding in which the bulbus glandis of the male's penis swells inside the bitch’s vagina... lock[ing the dogs] together for 15 to 20 minutes”); and the cloacal sac found in frogs and other species.

One of Tiley’s ”rope paintings” featured in this presentation, How Bats Drink Water (2019), hints that my thoughts around animal behavior (human and otherwise) might not be so far off the mark. Made from silk chiffon bound with rope and painted with crackling layers of black tempera, the work is of a piece with Tiley’s ongoing interest in both representing and transcending the human body. As the artist explained in an interview with Zeit Contemporary art, the rope paintings “...came out of an idea about how to convey some of the ideas from my performances in a form that doesn't require performers... I wanted to create a painting style that had or that could convey this idea of an embodied presence in a room–that you weren't looking so much at a painterly surface or an object, but you got a sense that you were looking at an actual body...”

Paired with actual live bodies – as well as The Marble Faun’s frozen phantasms–the works in the gallery seem to blur the line not only between corporeal and material, but also the distinction between human beings and the apparel that we adorn. Whether we have the consciousness to accept this or not, our garments continuingly signal to the world our implicit and explicit sexual desires–or lack thereof (which, as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has commented, is also a desire in and of itself). As Tiley has remarked, in relation to the artist’s fashion work: “I have a hard time believing that a person stops at the edge of their skin”. The boundaries we construct around our sexual identities are as rigid or as pliable as we allow them to be, and the same can be said about our bodies. Who we share them with, and why, and how, and where (in an art gallery at 5:05pm EST with a crowd of conservatively dressed artworld people looking on?) will never not be fascinating.

And how do bats drink water, you may wonder?

They echolocate bodies of water by squeaking, and then listening for an echo that occurs straight below them and not up ahead. When they hear this distinctive echo, they dive straight down and open their lower jaw to scoop out a sip of water, before flying off into the night.

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Aimee Walleston is a cultural critic, essayist and adjunct professor working in New York City. She has written for publications including Real Life, Art in America and Do Not Research, among many others.

Go further:

Vincent Tiley

New Discretions

Situations

Jerry Torre